Speaking at Microsoft's financial analysts meeting today, CEO Steve Ballmer was refreshingly realistic about the company's struggles in smartphones and tablets. "Mobile devices. We have almost no share."

Right. Now that Ballmer himself admits it, can we please settle the discussion? Windows Phone has been a failure up until now.

WP8 already has a bigger marketshare than Apple in many countries. This is remarkable achievement for a brand new OS.

What is remarkable is the decline in windows market share on mobile devices. Microsoft is really not a new player in this. On the contrary, of the three large ones, Microsoft has been in the smartphone business longest by far.

No one would have said it is remarkable if they had kept their market share from the early 2000. Now, that they're way south of that mark, it is an achievement?

Considering the market is very different now, yes. It is an achievement. They are no longer a market leader. That's their goal again, for sure, but not being able to commend them on milestones on the way there is absurdly small of you.

Considering the market is very different now, yes. It is an achievement.

It is an achievement anyone could accomplish, if they were willing to take a big enough loss. That is what Microsoft is doing right now. All that cash sent to Nokia, all that advertisement money for Windows Phone - that's what "achieved" this. Has anyone calculated how much that amounts to per sold Windows Phone?

I should commend them on that? Sure, I'll play along. "You've got piles of money, Microsoft. Well done!"

Considering the market is very different now, yes. It is an achievement. They are no longer a market leader. That's their goal again, for sure, but not being able to commend them on milestones on the way there is absurdly small of you.

Nelson, are you trying to push Windows Phone/Tablet positively even if the owners says it isn't? And in my country, Windows Phone booth is a ghost town, I may check it if I get to the mall next time.

You piss off your user base and become a worse ass than apple. Then you have trouble getting your customers back. What the hell is the problem with a flash plugin? The stupid Gmail website works better on windows phone 8 than in 4.3! It runs flawless, even down to chatting, and there is no need for an app. Just about any website works just as expected. But it took me 4 years to go back to windows because they pissed me off with how they just killed off windows mobile for so long, then release something more mediocre than IOS 2. No copy and paste!
I wasn't just going to go leave android because windows had a phone again. Unless 8.1 improves a little bit in October I am going to check out qnx and check out windows latter. But it is nice to have an os that I don't have to root, change kernel and debloat to be fast. And it has stayed fast. In android I carried so much baggage with apks to do this and that. One example, I would install a lightweight launcher. if I removed trebuchet and ever had to delete user data then i had no launcher installed. I would have to put apks in system. I didn't think it was annoying back then to adb install, shell, and push. But now that i have a windows phone and look back. Thank goodness. I work on android and IOS all day and its so annoying having to put adb online and permit a computer to connect. Dude i only need to install and push few things! Sometimes just ar.apk or triangle away!